Following the Plan Friday

It's Friday!!  Woohoo!  We had a great week, but I'm glad for the weekend.  Actually, I'm looking forward to next week when Katelyn starts school.  We'll be getting a part of our routine, which will include joining the school for their morning pledge and prayer time.  Katelyn's school lost their principal, so in the transition, our Pastor is going to be taking over the spiritual aspects, which include morning prayer.  He plans to be there praying with the kids every morning that he is in town and he is calling it "chapel" because he plans to "share a thought" with the kids every morning.  I'm so excited about this!  THEN, they changed the extended chapel service from Thursday afternoons to Friday morning (basically just extending morning chapel time), so we can go!  I've wanted to take Tyler to chapel, but the time has been prohibitive due to the littles nap time and their general inability to sit quietly during prayer time.  Now that they are older and the time is better for us, we are all going to go and take part.  I think this will be a huge blessing to all of us.

Oh, yeah, I'm supposed to be talking about our week.

We had so much fun this week with our Letter B projects.  I have been so impressed with Jason's abilities and learning just in these few weeks.

The boys thoroughly enjoy gluing anything and everything.  I have a bunch of bottles of glue leftover from a birthday party so I am having them use those before I buy glue sticks.  They love watching the glue come out and "that's enough, that's enough!" can be heard over and over during Preschool.

One thing that I've really had to work on in myself is letting go of my desire to do things "Just Right".  For example, on Tuesday one of our projects was to make a handprint barn scene.

I started with Jason.  I painted his hand yellow and made the print for the duck.  Washed him off, painted his hand brown and made the print for the horse.  Washed him off and prepared to paint his hand black for the sheep.  He told me that he was done with the handprints and just wanted to paint.  So I told him to paint a red barn onto his paper.

He painted the whole entire paper around his handprints red.

While working with Jason, Justin decided that he wanted to paint his barn, the one that I had made for them to put animal stickers into.  He would not be dissuaded.  He wanted nothing to do with handprint painting.  He just wanted to paint the barn.

So he did.

Tyler wanted to paint Luigi.  So he did.

Katelyn was the only one who painted a barn scene.

I felt a little frustrated, but quickly made myself get over it because they were having fun!!!  They weren't going to learn any more by having a perfect picture than they were by just painting whatever they wanted.

The same with everything else.  So the windshield of the bus was not actually on the bus.  He didn't know, didn't care, and was so proud of his bus.

And, by the end of the week, Jason can identify an A and a B and tell me what sounds they make.

Justin glues black shapes onto his paper plate soccer ball.

Gluing a black stripe onto his basketball.

Cutting out his hot air balloon.

Proudly showing off his hot air balloon in the sky.

Jason's hot air balloon activity.  He was very serious about showing this off.

The barns that I made for them to put animal stickers into.

Jason's Handprint Barn Animals Painting.

Justin insists on painting his barn.

Katelyn's beautiful barn painting.

Jason draws a door onto his bus.

Making "B" word cookies.  I didn't have the ingredients to make the bus cookies that I had linked, so I thought we would make bus shapes out of sugar cookies.  Well, that didn't really go over well, but making things that started with B did, so we choose all of our cookie cutters that were B words.  Jason enjoyed rolling out and cutting the cookies.  Justin worked over one section of dough until it was gone...into his mouth.

I think this crazy idea of mine is working!

Other notes:  The "Find the Bear" activity was a huge hit!!  We spent a good amount of time with that game.  I saved it to pull out when we need something to do.

I am enjoying all of the books that we are reading.  We go to the library every other Saturday and it takes me about an hour to find all of the books that I need for the next two weeks, but we are really enjoying the wide variety of books that we are reading, rather than just the same few series that we know.  A couple of books have been a little "off", but I've just used it for conversation about making good choices or why we didn't like the book.

How's your week going?